Spelling Error
by William Easley
Summary: The next story in the continuity of "The Big Con," this one takes place in early July, when Mabel and her friends discover an incantation said to call the Fey Folk. The girls decide to try it; afrer all, what could go wrong? Not much shipping, but some Wendip, which is a common thread in this particular continuity imagining the Mystery Twins' second Gravity Falls summer.
1. Chapter 1

**Spelling Error**

 _(Author's note: This story joins several others in a continuity. In order, they are "Baby, Baby" [happened the previous fall and is something of a set-up], "The Woman with the Cipher Tattoo," "The After Party," and "The Big Con.")_

 **Chapter 1: I Am Bored**

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines**

 _Friday, July 5, the Mystery Shack: In my time, I have confronted earthly and unearthly horrors. Some have threatened to end my life and those of their friends. Some have threatened horrors even worse than death!_

 _But none of them are as soul-wrenching as one of my sister's sleepovers._

 _Mabel's at it again. You'd think after our little adventures with the Admiral's ghost and the world's biggest con, she'd want a little down time, right?_

 _Wrong. This evening after dinner she bopped up to the attic, where I was transcribing photocopies of Grunkle Ford's most recent notes on the supernatural into Dipper's Journal of the Uncanny 1 (pages 33-42, and I'm not finished yet)._

" _Hi, broman," Mabel chirped, hopping up on my bed and using it as a trampoline. "So why aren't you down in the gift shop whispering sweet nothings into Wendy's ear?"_

" _Because Wendy's ear isn't there," I told her. "She's off at six, remember? It's nearly eight."_

" _Righhhht," Mabel said. "Boingy! Boingy! Boingy! So that brings me to my request. Get out."_

" _What?"_

" _I NEED the attic, Dipper," Mabel said in her sing-songy "do what I want or face the consequences" voice. "Grenda and Candy and Amy are coming for a sleepover, and the guest room's too small. You sleep there tonight and let the girls take over the attic."_

" _Absolutely not," I told her._

 _She launched herself off the bed, tackled me out of my chair, and flung me to the floor._

 _After five minutes of enduring her holding me down and tickling me I gave up. What is it with girls and sleepovers? I grumbled a little, but I put my supernatural journal and the copies of Grunkle Ford's notes away, got my pillow and blanket—Mabel's is always covered in glitter—and trudged downstairs._

 _Mabel has redecorated the little guest room. Of course. It's small, only about ten feet square, but she took advantage of the limited space by plastering posters of boy bands on all the walls. Except on one she has a poster of a unicorn, but she's been using it as a dartboard._

 _There's no desk, but she has a little table and a chair, so I shoved her makeup and craft supplies into a cardboard box and now I'm sitting there recording these thoughts in my daily journal. Meanwhile two floors up above me it sounds as if the girls are not only taking over the attic but taking it apart._

 _OK, I think I've described Grenda and Candy before. Grenda has a deep voice and a build like a junior-league wrestler; Candy is petite and Korean (I think—or maybe Chinese? I'll have to ask Mabel) and once she had a serious crush on me for about twenty-two minutes. Amy Lowrance, though, is someone new in Mabel's circle this summer—Mabel just met her a few days ago and I saw her for the first time this evening. She's our age (13) and is in the eighth grade (like us, but here in Gravity Falls, of course). Her mom and dad own and run a pharmacy. She's a cute girl, a sort of redhead, but not in a Wendy way, more a sort of rusty-red brown way, and her curly hair is sort of bristly. She's all right, I guess, but with Mabel's friends you never really know._

 _Anyway, Candy's family is off somewhere visiting relatives, and Candy is staying with Grenda for two weeks. And Amy's parents are off in San Francisco for a weekend pharmacists' conference, and SHE's visiting Grenda until Tuesday. And Grenda's parents are OK with her having a sleepover here tonight . . . and tomorrow night . . . and the night after._

 _I'm not surprised. Grenda has anger issues which she relieves by punching things. Like telephone poles, mailboxes, the pillars that hold up the roof of her family's porch, a police patrol car (once, but it required serious body work), small trees, unicorns, and guardian ogres. I imagine Grenda's being away for a few days is like a vacation for her folks._

 _Anyway, the girls are upstairs giggling and squealing. And here I am in the new guest room, off the Museum and really kind of small and cramped and smelling of Mabel's paste and orange-scented perfume and colored markers, and I have my computer but the wi-fi signal is weak and slow here, and I don't have ANY of my books and I'm afraid to go up to the attic to get them because I might fall victim to a makeover ambush._

 _I just hope the noise level falls to a dull roar so I can get some sleep. It's going to be a long, long weekend . . . ._

* * *

"Um . . . truth, I guess," Amy Lowrance said, blushing. She, Candy, and Grenda sat on the floor of the attic. Mabel lay sprawled out on her old bed, head hanging over them, upside down. All she lacked were the googly eyes glued to her chin to be a perfect Mr. Upside-downington, but she figured the others were too sophisticated for that.

"EEEE!" Grenda squealed. "Okay, okay, tell the truth: Do you think Mabel's brother's cute?"

Amy blinked. "Um, Dipper? Well . . . he's kind of sweaty and awkward, isn't he? Um, no, I guess not. Sorry, Mabel. He just doesn't appeal to me."

Candy shrugged. "That leaves more Dipper for me," she said.

"Ooooh!" Grenda said with a smirk. "Are you two an item?"

Candy adjusted her round glasses, glanced shyly down and off to the side and said, "Not really. He does not feel the same way. And I think he has a crush on Wendy. Anyway, I have moved on since he shattered my heart."

"Man, does he ever have a crush on Wendy!" Mabel said from where she lay, rolling over onto her stomach. "She finds it sort of sweet and cute, and she doesn't mind. I think Wendy's kinda off high-school boys right now, you know, too many bad experiences, and Dipper's so shy he's not, well, like them, not pushy and handsy and all. I think Wendy'd be up for a little of the old smoochie-smoochie, if Dipper wouldn't morph into such a dork around her. But he's just so incredibly shy about it!"

"The good ones are always like that," Grenda grumbled. "It took Marius forever to work up to our first kiss. Man, I had to kiss _him_ like six thousand times before he kissed me once!"

"Okay," Amy said, "Mabel's turn. Truth or dare?"

"Oh, truth," Mabel said. She pulled her hands inside her sweater sleeves and waved them while her eyes rolled in different directions. "What have I got to hide?"

"How many boys have you kissed?" Amy asked.

"We want NAMES!" Grenda roared, pounding the floor.

"Oh, there are so _many!_ " Mabel said, sticking her tongue out of the corner of her mouth as she thought. "First was Mermando, he's a merman. We had to break up though because his family forced him into an arranged political marriage, and now he's King of the Manatees."

"Oh!" Candy said. "I hope that his back does not get lacerated by the propellers of trolling motors!"

Mabel leaned her chin on her palm. "Then last year at school in Piedmont, there was Larry, but he's not a good kisser. Worse than kissing a leaf blower. I know what I'm talkin' about here, ladies! And, um, after the Fall Festival dance there was Hugh DeVille, but unfortunately he has braces too, and after we locked together for three hours, I'd had enough of him. That's two . . . Christmas party at the school gym, Tony under the bleachers. No zing, you know? And then . . . . "

Mabel went through another six names, the last one from the previous night, following the Gravity Falls fireworks show. Grenda threw a pillow at her. "You are a WILD THING!" Grenda shouted.

"You are a kissy slut, I think," Candy added.

Amy laughed. " _Candy_!"

"Is that not a good word?"

"I'll take it as a compliment," Mabel assured her. She picked up the pillow. "One, two, three, four, I declare a pillow war!"

If Soos and Melody had bought down-filled pillows, feathers would have flown. However, these were all memory-foam pillows. True, after the epic screaming pillow battle, many of the pillows probably would have preferred amnesia.

Melody put in an appearance and firmly asked for a little less noise, and the girls promised they'd quiet down. Candy suggested telling ghost stories. So they told the one about the escaped homicidal maniac with a hook for a hand, and the one about the hitchhiking girl who turned out to have died exactly one year before the guy picked her up, and the one about Bloody Mary in the mirror, and . . . .

"Heard all these," Grenda complained. "Boring!"

"Yeah," Amy agreed. "The trouble is, there aren't any _new_ spooky tales."

"Mabel could tell you stories about what she and Dipper did last summer," Candy said. "Dipper is a ghost annoyer."

"Well . . . only two or three ghosts," Mabel said. "But plenty of other creepy stuff. Like his unwashed underwear!"

"Oh, girl!" Amy said, falling over backward and laughing, "I'd trade you that for my brother's smelly socks! Gah-ROSS!"

"But there were other supernatural creatures besides ghosts," Candy said.

"Yump!" Mabel said. "I think the worst was the Shapeshifter. This one time it made itself look exactly like Wendy, and the two Wendys had to fight each other, and Dipper picked up Wendy's axe and chopped the monster in the stomach—"

"No freakin' way!" Amy said, her hand over her mouth.

"Oh, yeah, and it bled green, but it's almost impossible to kill a Shapeshifter, and it recovered and we froze it, but it took on Dipper's form as we were freezing it."

Amy had to have the whole story then. After telling it, Mabel said, "Hey, I think there's a sketch of it in one of these books." She rolled off the bed and from the shelf near it she took Volume 3 of Grunkle Ford's Journal (Yeah, yeah, Bill incinerated them, but Dipper found a way around that, see the story "Baby, Baby" if you really want to know). She found the sketch. "I think it's an alien. Or a mutation."

"That's why my folks won't ever let me go into the forest here in the valley," Amy said. "People tell such strange stories. Like there are supposed to be real Gnomes."

"Oh, there are," Grenda said. "One of them ate our cat food one night."

"I did not know you had a cat," Candy said.

"We don't," Grenda said.

"Yeah, and I almost married all of them once," Mabel told Amy. "Gnomes, I mean. Not cats."

"We don't _have_ a cat," Grenda insisted. "It was for my grandma's feet."

"What kind of book is this?" Amy asked.

"Oh, it was written by my Grunkle Ford. He had this house built years ago. He's a paranormal researcher, really into weird stuff. Then his twin brother, Grunkle Stan, took over the house for about thirty years and turned it into the Mystery Shack museum and gift shop. Now they're both kind of permanent house guests of old man McGucket, since Soos got married and he and Wendy took over running the Shack and live here now. Long story, boring."

"What's this one?" Amy asked, reaching for another thick book. "'Dipper's Journal of the Uncanny?'"

"My bro wants to follow in Grunkle Ford's footsteps," Mabel explained. "That's his, and I guess it's sort of private."

"So he wouldn't want us to look in it?" Amy asked.

"No, definitely not," Mabel said. She flopped to the floor. "So what are you waiting for? Open it!"

As it happened, Dipper's journal opened at page 33, where he had begun reproducing Ford's notes on "The Riddle of the Fey."

"Is that even English?" Grenda asked, pointing at the letters Dipper had printed under the heading:

KSB AFTITBJ ZA RIFMTKP AWWJ NTWW VTCYFG SLXFYJ FYC KIFYJAZIX KSBX!

KSBP XLJK EB IBJDLBC EP XTCYTRSK ZA KSB YBOK ALWW XZZY ZI IBXFTY AFTITBJ! (Note: 6B 18SO-f7)

"No, it's a code of some kind," Mabel said. "See, it starts up on the next page in normal English."

 _In Celtic Europe there are legends of the Fey Folk. My researches have indicated that in Gravity Falls the legends are true. On a night of the new moon, when the sky was quite dark, equipped with my night-vision glasses I once spied a ring of fey-folk (the British call them "fairies") dancing in a forest clearing. By a rather dangerous method, I learned the secret of calling them, which because of the great danger encoded above should NEVER be done lightly, or without full knowledge. However, I record the method here for its scientific interest._

"Fairies dancing? I don't believe it," Grenda said.

"It sounds far-fetched, I think," Candy agreed.

"Let's try it!" Mabel said, reading silently through the incantation.

"That's a really bad idea," Amy said.

Mabel laughed. "Little teeny fairies? C'mon. What could go wrong?"


	2. Chapter 2

**Spelling Error**

 **Chapter 2: "Wee folk, good folk, / Trooping all together" ("The Fairies," William Allingham)**

 **-From the Journals of Dipper Pines**

 _What IS it with girls and sleepovers? It's 1:00 in the morning, and I still can hear them giggling up there! It's lucky that Soos and Melody and Soos's Abuelita live in the other wing of the Shack. It's unlucky that the attic is more or less right over the guest bedroom._

 _I started out feeling a little bit guilty that I hadn't told Mabel about how Wendy and I watched the fireworks. And she kissed me! And we held hands._

 _But then I know Mabel. She'd go overboard, and before you knew it, she'd be planning what dress she was going to wear as our Maid of Honor. I think Wendy and I are in a good place right now. I don't want anything to ruin it._

 _Well. As I wrote these few last lines, it finally quietened down upstairs. Maybe I can get a little sleep. Tomorrow I want to meet with Grunkle Ford and talk about his latest notes on the supernatural creatures of Gravity Falls. There's so much I still don't know._

 _But right now—bed._

 _I wonder if Wendy's asleep._

 _I wonder if she might be dreaming of me._

* * *

"All right," Mabel said. "Let's check off the ingredients. A brown egg."

"Got it," Grenda said. "'Course I had to use a crayon, but it's really brown!"

"Check!" Mabel glanced back at her list. "Next: A strand of web spun by a night-spinning spider."

"I have that," Candy told her. "I took it from the corner there."

"Do you know it's from a night-spinning spider?"

"Oh, yes! I caught him in an empty paint jar and spun him like crazy!"

"Good thinking, girl! Hmm," Mabel murmured. "Hair from the heads of those who would witness the fairy dance. Ouch!"

"Got it!" Grenda said. Amy and Candy were rubbing their heads.

Amy complained, "You didn't have to take so _much!_ "

"Only one hair per person is required," Mabel said.

"Well—maybe we'll see some six-foot tall fairies!" Grenda said, handing over a fistful of assorted hair. "Anyway, I pulled a lot out of my own scalp!"

"Check," Mabel said. "Okay, 'a caudle brew.'"

"Do we have any caudle?" Amy asked.

"Maybe it is misprint for 'candle'?" Candy suggested.

Amy had picked up Dipper's big dictionary. "Caudle, caudle, caudle . . . OK, it says here that 'caudal" means 'having to do with a tail,' or 'the posterior of a body.'"

"Ewwww!" the others exclaimed.

Mabel looked over Amy's shoulder. "No, it's C-A-U-D-L-E," she said.

"Oh." Amy flipped some pages. "Here it is: 'a warm drink often given to sick people, frequently milk with eggs and sugar.'"

"A Pitt Cola will probably do," Mabel said. "You can drink it if you're sick, I guess."

"Or if you're well, it will make you sick," Candy said.

"Perfect! Covered both ways! Dipper keeps a stash under his bed."

"He drinks them without ice?" Amy asked.

"He says ice just means going downstairs and climbing back up." Mabel wormed her way beneath Tripper's bed and came out with a can of cola and several dust bunnies, some of which looked suspiciously animate.

"Okay, caudle brew, got it. Next, 'a toe of toad.'"

"I am not going to cut off a poor little toad's toe!" Amy said decisively.

"No, that's kinda gross. Wait a minute, though!" Mabel got a pale green square of paper from a sticky-note pad and with one of Dipper's thinking pens, she sketched out something that could well have been a toad. Or a Great Dane, or Ponce de Leon, or an axolotl, for that matter. She carefully tore off one of the toes. "Got it. Reasonable substitute!"

There were thirteen ingredients in all, and somehow or other they found the real things or came up with substitutions for all of them. "Now," Mabel explained, "we mix everything in a cauldron over a hot fire and while it's steaming, we each pour a dipperful on the ground."

"That could be a problem," Grenda said. "How are we gonna get Dipper to stay still long enough to fill him up with this slop?"

"And not just once, but four times!" Candy said.

"I don't think it means my brother," Mabel said. "It isn't capitalized here. And anyway, his name isn't really Dipper, it's M—"

"Wait!" Amy said. "If the directions say to pour it on the ground, won't we have to go outside?"

"Hmm. That's a good point," Mabel agreed. "Okay. We'll sneak out and go to the bonfire clearing on the edge of the woods. I'll grab a saucepan and some charcoal briquettes—Soos has a big bag of the ready-to-use kind that you just touch a match to. We'll mix the brew up outside and then try it! Get a bag."

A few minutes later, dressed in pajamas (or in Mabel's case a long T-shirt) and slippers, they padded across the yard of the Shack. Mabel had Dipper's flashlight and led the way. Grenda carried the bag with the ingredients, and Amy and Candy had the charcoal, a saucepan, and a ladle—close enough to a dipper, Mabel said.

The grass was wet with dew already, which shimmered and flashed in the flashlight beam, and stars sparkled brightly overhead. An owl asked "Who?" but they didn't bother to answer.

The girls followed a short trail to the clearing, and in the fire pit Mabel spread out the charcoal and lit it. First it flared up with blue and yellow flames; then it began to show patches of white ash on the porous black surface, and the flames died down; and then it became a mass of red-hot coals. Mabel put three rocks around the small pile of coals and balanced the saucepan on them. She popped the Pitt's—psssshhh!—and then added each ingredient, one at a time.

The instructions didn't say whether the mess should be boiled our not, but soon enough it was at least steaming. "Okay," Mabel said. "Now each of us takes a dipperful of the brew and you dribble it onto the ground while reciting the spell. I'll go first."

She swept up a dripping ladle of cola mingled with various other things and started to drip it a little at a time while incanting:

" _VOUL VEMCH FHAA MIF DYA VAAMTH EWTH ZDLAAN,_

 _CHEN UW DYU PETHUAZ OW WED UW THLAAN . . . ."*_

* * *

 _*Note: At Stanford Pines's urging, we omit the last four lines of the chant, not that we believe any of this stuff, but you never know, you know?  
_

* * *

From the spot where the mixture wet the earth, a little steam appeared, lingering and wavering. Amy went next and tried her best to wrap her tongue around the strange-looking words that Mabel had copied from Dipper's book and which she illuminated with her flashlight. Same result.

Then Grenda, and last of all Candy.

"Okay," Mabel said. "Come on, fairy guys show us something."

The four little wisps of steam hung on, swaying. They looked weird enough, but not like fairy figures.

"Something is missing, I think," Candy said.

"Look fairies, we're not gonna wait all night," Mabel warned. "If you've got something to show us, let us see!"

"Douse the light," Grenda suggested.

Mabel switched off the flashlight. Now the only illumination came from the ruddy glow of the small charcoal fire. However, in that weak red radiance. . . .

"Little people!" Candy said.

They all leaned close. The four wispy vapors now showed at their hearts tiny human-like figures—but winged and delicate as a dragonfly. They seemed to be dancing—in a way—at least, they moved in harmony with each other, raising their little arms and twirling on their tiny toes at the same moment.

"Well, this isn't much," Grenda complained. Then she bawled, "Hey fairies! TALK TO US!"

All the miniature figures clamped their hands over their ears. One of them, the pink one—they had gradually taken on pastel tones, pale blue, green, yellow, and pink—squeaked, "My goodness, you don't have to be so loud!"

"Are you guys like for real or just illusions?" Mabel asked.

"We're as real as you are!"

"Why are you so hard to see?" Amy asked.

" _Us_? You are like vapors and mists, big ones!"

"Hey," Mabel said, "let's not fight over who's real and who's transparent. Are there more of you?"

"Many more."

"Tell you what. Come with us back to the Mystery Shack and up to the attic and call your friends and you guys can have a dance party."

The pink figure crossed its arms and jutted its tiny chin into the air. "Inside a human dwelling? I think not!"

"Why not?" Mabel asked before adding in her most tempting tone, "We have a big bag of gummy apes!"

The green one, which sounded marginally masculine, said, "We did enter that dwelling once many seasons ago. The one with the red hat invited us."

"Oh!" said the yellow one, definitely feminine, "that was so horrible! He tried to imprison us in a fish tank!"

"That was just Grunkle Stan trying to make a buck," Mabel said with a laugh. "He doesn't live there now. Come on—it'll be fun!"

The blue one—male by the sound of the voice, a kind of very thin baritone—said, "We had to buy our way out last time with fairy gold! Rental of the ballroom space, payment for the band—"

"And they were our own musicians!" the pink one added.

The blue one was counting off items on its fingers. "Damage deposit, which we never got back, clean-up surcharge, catering, security—you can't imagine how much fairy gold we had to conjure!"

"Good thing it was only dry leaves when the sun came up," the yellow one added.

The blue one got huffy: "It's the principle of the thing!"

"Wait, wait," said the pink figure. "Just a moment, big ones."

The four—well, fairies, let's call them that—clustered together and buzzed in a language that the girls could not understand. Then, very shyly, the pink little creature said, "We dare not enter the human structure, but if you would see a fairy dance, you may come with us to our bower."

"What's the catch?" Mabel asked.

"I do not understand."

"How are you going to try to trick us?" Mabel demanded. "You think I never watch cartoons on TV?"

The small creatures conferred again among themselves. Then the pink one said, "You may come or not, as you wish. It is your choice. And you may witness our dance or not, as you please. And when you wish to return, you may return. Is there any trick here that you can see?"

"Ladies?" Mabel asked.

The others thought hard and shrugged. "I will go if you will go," Candy said.

"I'm up for it!" Grenda said. "If they try anything funny, I'll squish 'em like bugs. Like BUGS!"

"I don't know," Amy said uncertainly. "But if everyone else wants to go, I guess I'm in."

"It's settled," Mabel said. "First, though, how far is it?"

"As near as a dream," said the pink fairy, "and as far as tomorrow."

"It is worlds away," the blue one agreed, "yet inside your heart."

"Cut the crap," Mabel said.

"Oh, very well. It will take you—what do you others think?" the pink one said. Again the fairies murmured in their strange language. "It will take you about ten minutes of human time to walk there or to walk back to this spot."

"That's not very far," Mabel said. "We can't possibly get lost. Okay, my phone says it's 1:45 right now. We'll leave before 3:00 AM, agreed?"

They all agreed.

"Then follow us!" the pink fairy said.

And they set off into the woods.


	3. Chapter 3

**Spelling Error**

 **Chapter 3: "Dinna ye see the bonnie path winding through the dell? / Dinna ye ken it leads to where the happy Fair Folk dwell?" (From "A Ballad of Elfland," author unknown)**

As they walked, Mabel kept glancing at her phone. Oddly, it seemed to her that some time had passed, but at the third check, the phone showed that only one minute had gone by since the four girls had agreed to walk where the four fairies led them.

"Is it getting darker?" Candy asked. "Or are they just getting brighter?"

"I can't tell. They do look more solid," Mabel said. "But we're under the trees now. I guess they look brighter because there's not as much light here. It's like Dipper's reading light—nothing during the day, but it really keeps you awake at night."

Mabel could tell that, with even the stars shielded, the path was growing steadily darker. And the shade wasn't from just the trees. Ferns, too, clustering thick on every side, added to the gloom of the passage. They were awfully big ferns, six feet tall or more, with fronds spreading fan-like from the bases, each frond shaped like a pulled-out diamond. When Mabel brushed against one, it felt wet—each frond wore dewdrops like a dress beaded with diamonds.

"Where are we, anyhow?" Grenda asked. "This doesn't look like the woods around the Shack."

"Oh, don't worry. It's just been a minute or two. We can't have gone far," Mabel assured her.

Amy, sounding uneasy, said, "I think these guys aren't just brighter. They're bigger than they were, aren't they? Are they growing?"

True, at first the four little creatures had seemed to be six inches tall, more or less—now they looked about half the size of Gnomes, maybe twelve or fourteen inches. And Mabel could see more detail, too—though they still glowed with their ethereal pastel light, they also looked somehow realer: long, thin bodies for their size, really quite beautiful, with graceful long, bare legs and arms, their clothing like a drift of shimmering vapor, their wings beating fast like a hummingbird's.

"I feel uneasy, I think. Maybe we should go back," Candy said.

"Listen!" Grenda told her. "Shh!"

They could all hear it, the strange words to a tune with its own uncanny musical scale in an unknown language, but lulling as running water in a cool brook, soothing as the breath of the west wind on an airless day, and sweet as a young mother's lullaby to her first baby:

" _Awm sweostres sebt ca mehan sheen,_

 _Awm medhom when abune,_

 _Gehn gendlich swa we chaunt etheen,_

 _Cathsune! Cathsune! Cathsune!"_

"It's a pretty tune," Amy said dreamily.

"No one who can sing that beautifully can be evil," Candy added.

"I can almost understand it," Mabel murmured. "It's a little like Dipper that way. Hiyo!"

Even though no one laughed, Mabel felt happy. Cheerful, even.

Somehow the clusters of ferns grew steadily thicker and taller, until they had to push heavy fronds aside to keep the flying fairies in sight. "We should be there by now," Grenda said.

"Only been three minutes," Mabel gasped after a quick look at her phone, wondering why she felt so tired.

Somehow, without passing through any obvious changes, the song the four fairies sang began to shape itself in their minds as English—and the four voices blended in strange, alien, but beautiful harmonies:

"By the seven sisters of the silvery sea,

By the waning moon on high,

By the four winds rushing free,

Come nigh, come nigh, come nigh!

Tread lightly as we weave our song,

Of joys that never die,

Come to our world and fear no wrong,

You'll neither mourn nor cry.

Human girls, tread light, tread light,

While near you Fair Ones fly—

Fear no Weird-Gaunt, nor fiend of night,

While we are by, are by.

Hear our chant and feel its power

Shaped beneath the sky—

Come and spend a merry hour

And never weep nor sigh.

Come to our home, walk in a dream

Though you tread with open eye—

Come to where the Fair Ones teem,

Come nigh! Come nigh! Come nigh!"

"Good beat, you could dance to it," Mabel muttered.

The blue fairy—definitely male, she could see now—glided down and with a flutter of wings landed beside her. To her delight, he gave her a sweeping bow. "Indeed, my lady, we have many merry tunes for dancing. You four shall dance with us, if you choose. Will you be my partner?"

She laughed. "We'd make a pretty strange pair! I mean, you're so small!"

He extended his hand and she automatically reached for and grasped it. "I am not too small to dance with you, my lady," he said, smiling.

Mabel blinked. He—he was just her height. But he had been so little before. How had that happened? And his hand felt cool but real in hers, his slender fingers gently holding hers. "Well—maybe one dance," she said, feeling a little dizzy.

"There is our palace, just ahead" the blue fairy said, gesturing as they left a stand of giant ferns and she stepped into a clearing.

Mabel squinted. "This is it? What a fixer-upper! It looks like a big mound of dirt and grass and tree stumps."

"Your human sight is dazzled by our glamour. See our home with our eyes." He covered her eyes with his free hand, then drew it away, the long fingers brushing both of her eyelids.

"Oh!"

Now Mabel saw a graceful dome, its sides woven of complex intersecting roots, some of which framed graceful arched windows through which a pale silvery light spilled. Music poured out, too, gentle and yet exciting, pulsating and sweet, the mingling melody of harp and lute, of fife and horn, of soft drums and tinkling bells. Laughter textured it and toned it and made her smile.

"Before we go inside, my lady, you must leave here your things of light and metal," the fairy warned her.

"Huh? My things of—"

He pointed to the hand in which she held her phone. "Oh." She carefully laid it on a stump. "I guess it'll be all right for an hour or two."

"And the steel in your smile?"

"The steel—oh, no, no, my braces are titanuman. Timantium. Titanium! Doy!"

"Not wrought of iron?"

"No, 'cause that would rust!"

"May I touch?"

Mabel grinned at him, and with the very tip of a pointed finger, he gingerly tapped, a very light touch. "Very well," he said, smiling. "I sense none of the man-metal. Come and we shall dance—oh, but you need a ball gown."

"It's all right. I've got my gight noun. Night noun. I mean night GOWN. I can't talk tonight! Like Jeff."

"Jeff?"

"You wouldn't know him." Mabel made a juggling gesture. "I mean, he's a Gnome, you're a fairy, you guys probably have issues."

"I know no Gnomes."

Mabel got a fit of the giggles. "Bet you can't say that three times fast! Anywho, I'm dressed okay unless it's like a formal dance."

"I insist. You need a lovely ball gown. I'll shape one of mist and dewdrops, of silken web and starlight bright." The blue fairy weaved his long hands together remarkably, almost as if they passed through each other.

Something fell from the sky, gently slipping over and onto Mabel—and her favorite nightshirt, the lavender one with the floppy disk pictured on it, somehow had transformed into a wispy, silky flow of strawberry-colored fabric, clinging to her, gleaming and trailing on the breeze like the tail of a shooting star. It glowed with its own inner light—and the fact that her legs and feet were bare didn't' bother her at all, because she'd never noticed how shapely they were before.

"Do you like it?" asked the blue fairy.

"Very much!" She blinked. The fairy actually had a handsome face, lean and smiling. "Um—what's your name?"

"Eireachdail."

Again she came down with a fit of the giggles. "Oh, brother no way I'll be able to pronounce _that!_ Um, what if I call you Airy? Will that do?"

"I am honored to be called that by you. And what is your name?"

"Mabel. It rhymes with able. It also rhymes with table—"

Without even seeming to interrupt, Eireachdail said, "In my language that name is Gohalainn. That means 'beautiful and loveable'."

"Wah-wah-wowie! You sure have _me_ pegged," Mabel said, feeling giddy. "So, okay, now that I'm dressed an' all, are we gonna dance?"

"We shall certainly dance, my lady Gohalainn, and the other ladies will be faint with envy of your beauty and charm. Come with me." He held his hand out again, and she took it.

He rose—and though she felt no tug, no pull of gravity, somehow she was floating beside him. For just a moment she vaguely wondered where the other girls were—but then she thought, _They're all right, the fairies will help them get dressed._

Then Airy led her through a tall archway and into the most wonderful place she had ever seen—even including Mabel Land.

And that was saying a lot.


	4. Chapter 4

**Spelling Error**

 **Chapter 4: "Anon the dawning of the Light / Scatters the Pictsies of the Night" (from "A Pixie Song," author unknown)**

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:**

 _Saturday, July 6: What a surprise, being able to sleep until a quarter to nine o'clock! Even at home in Piedmont, Mabel usually wakes me up by seven, usually by using the foot of my bed as a trampoline. Once by pouring pancake syrup in my ear, too._

 _Anyway, this morning I woke up slowly, like climbing out of a warm swimming pool. Of course, when I did open my eyes, I had that confusion you get when you've slept in an unfamiliar room—that kind of where-am-I moment until it all snaps into focus. I got out of bed and, another big surprise, got right into the bathroom for my shower._

 _See, usually when Mabel has a sleepover, she and her friends hog the bathroom. Their rule is that all the girls have to use the bathroom, shower, and fuss with their makeup (Mabel gets to use some blush this year, though with her cheeks she doesn't need it. When she uses it, she looks like a living ad for apples). For at least an hour and usually more, they block me from the bathroom. Sometimes her guests even come downstairs at the same time Mabel's showering and use both the men's and the women's room in the Museum!_

 _I mean, seriously, last year a couple of times when I got up and found the bathroom doors closed and locked, I had to take a quick walk in the woods, you know what I mean?_

 _This morning Melody greeted me when I came into the dining room, and Abuelita immediately fed me pancakes and juice. I asked what Mabel was up to, and Melody said, "Oh, she and her friends must have gone out early this morning. I'm sure they're nearby somewhere."_

 _Soos was expecting some buses full of tourists, and he was already in his Mr. Mystery costume—the black suit, the floppy bow tie, the fez, the eyepatch, the eight-ball cane and all. Wendy was restocking the gift-shop shelves, and I helped her finish that and talked to her as I tidied up for an hour or so, sweeping out the place, arranging the T-shirts by size, that kind of thing. We decided to meet for movie night at her place, since her dad and brothers were going out to bowl._

 _We've had movie nights before, but this morning I brought it up, asked her if she'd like to do it, and she said yes! I guess I made a date! First time!_

 _With Mabel and her friends camped out in the attic for the next couple of days, I decided I might as well go see Grunkle Ford this morning and get him to help me with some of the codes and ciphers in his notes. He always writes down a hint to the key, but then a lot of the time he forgets what the hint means and we have to sit down and puzzle it out._

 _So I went up to the attic and found the girls had not yet returned. More, I saw that during the night they had been messing with my books and left them scattered all over the floor. I picked them up and put them back in order and grabbed up the photocopies of the notes that I had just copied into my supernatural journal. I shoved them into an oversized manila envelope, put on my cap, and went downstairs again._

 _A bus had just rolled in, and Soos stood outside, happily giving them the grand spiel. He really loves being Mr. Mystery! Grunkle Stan says he's not crusty enough to be really convincing, but Soos really gets into it, and he's popular. In fact, sales are better under him than they used to be under Grunkle Stan, but then Soos doesn't usually scare people away by acting nuts._

 _So after the herd of tourists had gone into the museum, I got on my bike and rode through town on my way to the McGucket house. By then it was after ten, and getting hot already. I saw Gideon Gleeful coming out of his dad's used-car lot, and he waved and I waved back. I don't really like him (though I admit I kind of respect him for standing up to Bill Cipher), but from what I hear in town, he's not nearly the pain in the rear he used to be. Though I also heard he's organized the rising sixth grade at Gravity Falls Middle School into a kind of organized-crime syndicate._

 _Guess it's better he's trying to take over the school than the town. Probably one of these days he's going to run for President or something. He was a rotten psychic, but he could be a great crooked politician or political crook._

 _The climb up the hill to the mansion is always a challenge on a bike, and I made it only by standing and pushing down hard on the pedals. Nobody was in the house except the robot Chair Man Miaow, who gives me the creeps. He directed me to the back yard._

 _I almost didn't recognize Old Man McGucket! He'd had a haircut and a serious beard trim, and he stood out in the sun with a cup of coffee, enjoying the morning. In shoes—just black trainers, but real shoes and not swaths of bandage!—and khaki trousers and a blue work shirt, he really looked sort of distinguished, like a college professor taking a day off. His wife Mayellen, wearing a floral dress and a sunbonnet, was puttering around with a watering can and a trowel, neatening the flowerbeds. She greeted me with a kind of friendly, vague smile._

 _She seemed to be enjoying the gardening, and as we watched her, McGucket told me, "She made me get all prettified up. I even lost my beard bandage what I had for thirty-odd years! And she reminded me to take the ding-dang cast off my wrist. Turns out that break healed up three whole decades ago. Feels funny not havin' it on, though." He leaned closer and said quietly and hopefully, "I think she's comin' along, Dipper, getting' her emotions back. She even laughs now an' then. Lordy, but she's havin' a hard time catchin' up with all the changes in the world. Lost all them years captive in the Sentivore's cave. Tomorrow we're goin' over t' Portland with Tate. She's happiest when we're with our boy."_

" _So you and Tate are OK?" I asked._

 _He shrugged. "We're tolerable. Boy loves his mama, an' for her sake, he's sorta made it up with me. I wish we were closer. Hope we can get there one day. Dipper, never neglect them who you love. Never tell yourself they's always time for family later. Worst thing in the world is to realize you done run plumb out o' that time an' you got nobody."_

" _I'll remember that," I told him. "Fiddleford, where's Grunkle Ford? I came over to see him."_

" _Aw, I'm sorry," McGucket said. "You done missed him. Ford an' Stanley left early this mornin' to catch an airplane to Newark. They're goin' to visit the graves of their papa an' mama, your great-grandparents."_

 _That made me feel strange. "I didn't know."_

" _Yeah. I guess Stanley was what they call estranged from them and never knew what was goin' on with them. Stanford was kind o' their favorite, I hear. Then he disappeared—you know how—an' after that, their mama got sick. She passed on, oh, fifteen year ago. Mr. Pines didn't last more'n a couple of years after that, died on the tenth of July, which was their weddin' anniversary. He must've really loved her."_

" _This is the first I heard about all that," I said. "Mabel's and my grand-dad died when we were little, and I barely remember him. He never said much about his mom and dad."_

" _Well, after all that bad business last summer, Stanford found out what had happened from other relatives back East. He wants to go an' make his peace, I guess, and I expect Stanley does to, though he won't admit it. Don't make the mistake your grand-uncles did," McGucket warned me. "Don't ever drift away without lookin' back. Family's important. Stay close, Dipper. Stay close."_

 _I said I would try. Then, frustrated, I rode back to the Shack and settled in to make these notes . . . ._

* * *

Wendy's voice broke into his concentration: "Dipper, dude, you know where Mabel might be?" She stood in the doorway, wearing her fur hat and her green-plaid shirt, looking pretty but worried.

Dipper felt a qualm as he laid down his pen. "No. She's not back yet?"

Wendy shook her head. "It's not like her just to run off with her friends like this. She didn't check in with Soos or anything. Melody's worried."

"Not again," Dipper groaned. "Come on, let's look up in the attic. Maybe we can find a clue about what she's up to."

Twenty minutes later, Wendy was twice as worried, and Dipper, too, felt sick. "This is bad," he said. "Mabel's clothes from yesterday are in a pile here. She didn't come down to the guest room for a change this morning. The only things missing are her shoes and her nightgown—the long lavender one with the floppy disk on it."

"Where could she go, dressed like that?" Wendy asked.

Dipper shook his head. "When I came up here this morning, I found my books and notes all scattered out on the floor. Maybe they were fooling around with them. Let me check."

Unfortunately, he hadn't noticed which pages the books were open to. In fact, he couldn't remember just which books were in the floor—his new journal of supernatural events and investigations, for one, but his copies of Ford's journals had also been here and there. Were any of them left open? He couldn't remember.

"Hang on," he said. "My notes were all strewn around, too. I've got them down in the guest room."

He and Wendy went downstairs, and Dipper spread out the notes on the dining-room table. "I don't see anything that looks—wait a minute. This isn't my handwriting—it's Mabel's."

Wendy took the sheet of lined notebook paper, frowning. "What does this even mean? It's just, like, jibber-jabber."

Dipper frowned. The sheet had only a line on it, with every other word crossed out and rewritten, as if Mabel were copying unfamiliar terms and having trouble keeping the spelling correct: _"Voul vemch fhaa mif dya vaamth ewth zda. . . ."_

"Mabel's handwriting," Dipper said. "The i's are dotted with little smiley faces. Now, this looks familiar. I copied it out yesterday. Let me look in my journal for the line." He scanned through the last few pages he'd added. "Uh-oh. This is it. It's a magic incantation mean to summon the Fey folk."

Wendy looked over his shoulder, frowning. "The what now?"

"Fey. Also called the Fair Folk or the Fairies."

"Oh, man, don't tell me," Wendy groaned, leaning back. "What crazy language is that in, anyway? And how do you even say it?"

"It's an attempt to write out an ancient Celtic language phonetically," Dipper told her. "But I don't know how you'd start to pronounce some of these!"

Wendy crossed her arms, looking grim. "So I guess freakin' fairies are real, huh?"

Dipper shrugged. "Mabel and I saw one once, just before Soos killed it. He thought it was a bug."

Wendy heaved a disgusted sigh. "Man, we have to live in like the weirdest spot in America! I tell you, Dip, Gnomes, manotaurs, freaky-deaky unicorns, and now fairies. And I'm not even countin' Toby Determined, whatever _he_ is! So what next? Where do we start lookin'?"

Dipper clicked his pen. "Let me think, let me think. It'd have to be outside. Fairies shun human dwellings—well, most of them do, I mean the trooping fairies, which is—"

"Dude, dude," Wendy said, "wait, you're losin' me. I won't take up fairy species until eleventh grade Supernatural Biology."

"You will?"

"No! Jokin', man! Just tell me, all right? What is a trooping fairy?"

"A fairy that belongs to a clan or troop of its own kind," Dipper said. "They live together, and when they move from one place to another, they troop together. The opposite of them is the solitary fairy. That kind stays on its own and shuns other fairies. But they sometimes live in or visit human houses. They're like brownies and pucks and so on. Brownies can be helpful and do housework and bring good luck. Pucks are trickier. They can help or hinder humans. Other solitary fairies are almost always evil toward humans, like pixies and bogies."

"Okay, okay," Wendy said. "Who knew? Does any of this help us find Mabel?"

"Well—this invocation is supposed to work with trooping fairies," Dipper said. "They're organized into something called the Seelie Court, with their own king or queen or both, so they sort of have their own social order and laws and customs. They're not exactly evil, but they're not exactly good, either. They're normally pretty indifferent to humans, but they have no moral rules about how to treat us. So they can do bad things as easily as good ones. Sometimes they take human captives and turn them into slaves—or marry them."

"Yuck. So what do we do?"

"You stay here," Dipper said. "I'm gonna get my backpack and see if I can track Mabel and the girls. I'll call you if I get a lead. Soos is phoning the sheriff's office, but you know how much help they are."

"Oh, yeah," Wendy said, rolling her eyes. "Look, Dipper, you be careful out there, okay? Back in the cave when I thought you were dead, I—you just be careful. If you let a fairy murder you, I swear I'll kill you, dude!"

"I'll try not to let that happen," Dipper said, mustering a smile. He turned to head back to the attic for his backpack.

"Just a sec," Wendy said. "Kiss for luck."

 _My second real kiss! And from Wendy!_ When it was over, Dipper took a deep breath. _Now I have to concentrate. . . ._


	5. Chapter 5

**Spelling Error**

 **Chapter 5: "No matter how distant our travels, we never leave our parents behind."—Attributed to Benjamin Franklin**

The airliner rumbled with the deep-throated roar of the largest turbofan jet engines used in commercial aircraft. At an altitude of 39,000 feet, the sky outside the ports was a deep, deep blue. The clouds all lay far beneath the plane, like heaps of whipped cream.

"Relax, Stanley," Stanford Pines told his brother. "You can unclench your fingers now. Flying is safer than driving."

"It's not the flyin' that bothers me," Stan grumped, maintaining his grip on the seat arms. "It's the crashin' and burnin'."

"I used to love flying," Stanford said wistfully. "I didn't know about all the security and long lines these days."

"Happened while you were vacationin' in other dimensions," Stanley growled, clenching even more tightly as the plane banked in a slight course correction.

They occupied seats A1 and A2 aboard a Boeing 777, Great Horned Owl Airlines, out of Portland and headed for Newark by way of Chicago. Since the seats were arranged in a kind of herringbone pattern—so they could be fully reclined on long flights—Stanley actually sat a little abaft of his brother. He had complained from the first about the expense of flying first class. Stanford had waved that away. "My patent royalties earn more in twenty minutes than the whole trip will cost."

Stan sounded resentful at the implication: "Hey, I offered to pay my way!"

"I know, but you keep saying you can't turn any of your booty to cash before seven years have gone by."

"Statute of limitations is always my best friend," Stan chuckled. "Hey, speakin' of which, I hope the Jersey state ban on me has expired by now."

"Will you please just relax? No one is looking for you, Stanley. I checked. We'll be fine."

Stanley gazed out the window. The rim of the world looked slightly curved from this height. "Aw, I dunno, Ford. I feel kinda strange about this. I mean, Dad didn't want me ever to come back until I'd earned a fortune—"

"Which you did while you ran the Mystery Shack," Stanford assured him. "By my calculations, you made well more than a million dollars in thirty years."

Stan didn't look away from the window, but his voice was harsh: "Yeah, the majority of which I spent on fixin' up your crazy portal so I could get you back!"

With a smile, Stanford said, "And in case I haven't said it enough, thank you, Stanley."

Then turning from the port and grinning, Stan punched his brother's shoulder. "That's what I like to hear. Still, three thousand miles just to lay some flowers on their graves. Seems too little too late."

"We do the best that we can do," Stanford said. "We might visit one or two of our cousins while we're there. Take a look at the old pawn shop and apartment, if the building's still standing."

"Yeah, have some of them hot Belgian waffles for breakfast and one of Knuckles's Italian sandwiches for lunch." Stanley stretched and yawned. "Now, how long is this flight gonna be again?"

"Six hours and forty-five minutes, with a fifty-minute layover in Chicago," Stanford said. "We're over three hours into it now, so halfway there or a little more."

"Chicago. Wonderful town, I love it. Lotsa opportunities for guys who are smart. Ya know I'm not wanted there?"

"That is comforting information indeed. You know, Stanley, you should buy an insurance policy against being banned from anywhere else. It might pay off."

"Ah, no company is gonna be chump enough to write that kind of policy."

"Well, according to their television advertisements, Farmer—Stan! Do _not_ take your shoes off!"

"I'm just loosenin' the laces." Stan settled back in his seat. He felt odd—at Stanford's insistence, they had bought good shoes, good shirts, good suits, tailor-made, nothing off the rack. Shaved and with a recent haircut, the twins might have been prosperous bankers. Or Mafia dons, for that matter. But despite the finery, Stan industriously scratched his left armpit and asked, "So we'll get to Newark about, what, four PM?"

"Closer to seven. Remember the difference in time zones."

"Ah, right, slipped my mind. I don't fly that often, ya know. Used to be on a no-fly list with most of the major airlines."

"You've mentioned that. It's quite an . . . quite an . . . achievement . . . ."

Stanley gave his twin a long, hard look. "Hey, Braniac, what's the matter? Ya know I'm the one who should be feelin' glum. Mom and Dad not only kicked me out, they never wanted me to visit 'em. You, they'd welcome back with open arms."

"No, no, it isn't that," Stanford said. He shook himself like a man emerging from a swim or from a dream. "All right, so . . . so we'll rent a car in Newark, and then it's only a one-hour drive to Glass Shard Beach. We've got rooms reserved at the Toadfish Hotel . . . ." He trailed off again.

"That dump," Stanley muttered. "I saw their web page. 'Bedbug free since June.' I wonder if it's even been renovated since we were in high school—hey, genius, snap out of it."

Stanford rang for the attendant. One showed up immediately—one perk of first-class passage—looking jaunty in her brown uniform with its cap featuring feathery owl "ears." She leaned over with a smile. "Yes, sir?"

"How long until Chicago?" Stanford asked urgently.

"We expect to be at the gate at 2:15 PM, Central time," she said. "That's in about forty-five minutes."

"Thank you."

When the attendant had walked away—Stanley admired her walking style with a broad, appreciative grin—he asked, "So what was that about, Poindexter?"

"Stanley," Stanford said, "I don't want to alarm you, but I have the strangest feeling, kind of a premonition."

"You never said anything about that before!"

"They don't always pan out! And I have them only rarely. Anyway, I get a strong one sometimes, like now. As soon as we land in Chicago and can use our phones, I have to call Dipper right away."

Stanley couldn't keep the worry out of his voice: "What? Why?"

"I don't know why!" Stanford looked at his watch. "That'll be at 12:35 PM our time. Stanley, please don't ask me any more questions, because I cannot answer them. I just have an uneasy conviction that Dipper needs us."

"Hey," Stan said, his tone serious and level, "just say the word and we'll have 'em turn this airplane around."

Stanford shook his head. "There's no way of doing that."

"Brother," Stan said, "you really don't know me very well, do you?" He did not sound as if he were joking.


	6. Chapter 6

**Spelling Error**

 **Chapter 6: Into the Woods**

Wishing he had been a Boy Scout, Dipper slowly made his way through the forest. He found occasional hints: a salt-water taffy wrapper here, broken fern fronds there—but whether these were recent or old he could not tell—nor could he be sure they were traces that Mabel and her friends had left, although Grenda was notorious for carrying around pockets full of wax-paper wrapped salt-water taffy.

As the ferns grew thicker, he sometimes had to force his way. Scratched and wet from the dew that still clung to the fronds under the shade of the forest canopy, he stopped for a moment to catch his breath and called Wendy. She answered on the first ring. "Dipper! Any luck?"

His heart felt heavy. "No. I was calling to see if you guys had any word of them."

"No. the Sheriff and Deputy Durland were here. They're gonna put out an APB, but that won't do much good if they're out in the woods somewhere. You want me to come find you and help?"

"I'd love to see you, but no, you'd better hold down the fort there. I'll keep looking. Call if anything happens."

"Sure thing, man. Hey, Dipper—Just want to remind you, Mabel's good at getting' herself out of trouble, man."

"The problem is, she's a whole lot better at getting herself into it! But, yeah, I think she'd put up a good fight if something happened. And I think she's still okay. I don't have, you know, bad feelings. Anyway, you stay there and I'll call back if I find anything. 'Bye, Wendy."

"'Bye, dude."

When he was sure she had hung up, he said quietly, "I love you."

Another hundred yards, and he ran out of traces to follow. For the twelfth time since he'd started on the quest, Dipper called Mabel's cell.

And tilted his head sharply. From somewhere came a thin, faint tune: "I Never Knew Love 'til You Introduced Us," an eighties semi-hit that Mabel had adopted as her current ringtone. But before he could get a fix on it, he heard someone pick up. "Hi! Mabel here."

He sighed and mentally counted: _one, two, three, four, five_ . . . .

Then the voice on the phone giggled. "Ha! Gotcha! Didja think that was me? It's a _recording!_ Leave me a message at the tone. Boop!" Another burst of giggling. "That was me, too! Here's the real beep."

Dipper broke the connection and waited for the answering program to cycle. Then he dialed Mabel's number again.

The song again, faint in the air—

 _That way!_

Dipper moved ten yards or so to the left, then tried again. He'd been slightly tangent to the way he should have gone. _Let's see_. _Quarter turn to the right, and straight ahead . . . ._

Now he had entered a part of the woods that had been logged over maybe two decades earlier—gently decaying stumps of trees, festooned with fungi and nested in ferns, crowded the forest floor, and the new trees replacing the ancient oaks and cottonwoods was only half-grown. One more try—

And this time the sound was louder and close. Dipper pushed through a thicket of sword ferns toward it and just before Mabel's recording answered, he saw her phone, screen lighted up and pink case making it stand out, lying on a stump. He went over and picked it up. He was lucky: the screen showed that it held only a twenty per cent charge. A few hours later. . . .

Dipper thumbed the power switch off. "Mabel!" He yelled so loud that four or five alarmed chickadees flew from the branches of a fifteen-foot-tall cottonwood sapling.

But he heard no reply.

He looked around the small clearing—it seemed to stand inside a strangely regular barrier of five-foot-tall ferns—and tried to memorize the landscape. _Okay, okay, have to make sure I can find this spot again . . . ._

Dipper used the GPS app on his phone to find the exact coordinates for this nondescript spot in the woods. He took out his pen and wrote them down—first on the palm of his left hand, and then after he had pocketed his and Mabel's phones, in his notebook, with the explanation "Mabel's phone found here, left on a stump."

Then, just to be sure, he used his phone again to email the coordinates to himself.

 _Now where'd they go from here? Where's a clue, a sign?_

The ring of ferns bull's-eyed a clearing perhaps thirty yards across. Dipper stood a few feet from the base of a very low hill—only half as tall as the Mystery Shack, and about the same size as the whole building—a gentle dome crowned with a jumbled mass of lush green growth. He supposed that when the loggers were cutting through the woods years ago, they piled up all the stuff they couldn't use here—branches, root balls, leaf mold and other forest clutter—and left it. Now new saplings were patiently reclaiming it.

Dipper circled the mound, his eyes sharp for anything that might give him even a small lead. Where did they go from here? He slowly went around the entire perimeter, trying to reassure himself with every step. _She's OK. She's OK. I'd know if something really bad had happened to her. I'd feel it. I know I would. So she's OK, but—but where IS she?_

* * *

"They will sleep until moon-time comes," Feonor said, smiling.

His mate—the Fey don't have real marriages, but mate in partnerships that last until one or the other becomes bored, when they move on without ceremony or regret—his mate Lennan crossed her arms and tilted her head. The humans had not yet fully transformed. They were certainly smaller now, barely larger than the fairies, and their bodies more normal, more elongated, but their wings were only buds. "What have you named them again?"

"This one," Feonor said, indicating Candy, "is Milis, because her name in her tongue means something sweet. This strong one is Sruthan, for she burns with anger."

Lennan smiled. "Anger we may turn to our own use. We may bring her to hate her own kind—a human changeling often is the fiercest warrior when we must deal justice to the big ones."

"So I thought, my lady. This one—she is fearful and reluctant, the hardest of them to alter in mind or body—this one I call Isbrea, for her name means "beloved" in the human speech."

"And the one whose mind is a strange cloud of fancies and fears? Her human name, I think, is May Belle. 'Beautiful one of the springtime,' is that it?"

"Something like that. Eireachdail gave her a Fey name before I could do so. He calls her Gohalainn."

Lennan shivered and scowled. "I like that not! It is a name of ill omen."

"Aye, but you know the rules. Unless Eireachdail consents, none of our folk can change it."

"Tell him I want the name changed."

"That is useless. He will refuse, I know. He wants this one for himself."

Lennan balled her little fists. "Some time he will reach too far! Is he master here, or am I? Why did he even lead the others to answer the summons these humans made? We all felt it—it was pathetic, it did not follow form nor did it hold any binding power!"

"My lady, he says it has been too long since we took in new blood. If our kind had more luck in breeding—but there have been no new young born to us since before the big ones cut down the forest trees."

"And shall not be until the new trees gain full growth. Our lives are tied to theirs." She seemed to be listening to something. "Eireachdail . . . it is so hard to call to my memory . . . he was a human once, was he not?"

"Oh, yes, perhaps five generations of humans ago. He came chasing game into our sacred forest, and we misled him at night until Sianna took pity on him and transformed him to be her mate. I remember that well—her beauty enchanted him even before her spells did"

"Sianna. I barely remember her."

"A high-born, but she tied her life too closely to _Hen Frenin,_ the great redwood tree on the bluff. When men felled it, she withered and died, too. The tree and Sianna died more than a hundred and thirty moons ago."

Lennan shrugged. "You are the memory of the tribe, Feonor. You recall things that we others forget."

"There must be one such as I, my lady. Else we have no history."

She gave a scornful snort of laughter. "We are immortal. We have no need of history."

"We are only immortal unless we die, my lady. Sianna died. Others have died."

"Oh, we can be killed, but we live so long that we are nigh-immortal."

"They say that the humans have true—"

Lennan held up her hand for silence. Tensely, she said, "A human is near. I feel it circling our palace widdershins. Do you not sense it?"

Feonor bowed his head and closed his eyes. His wings twitched in surprise. "I do now. Shall I go kill him?"

"No, fool! In the sun you would be too weak, your arrows of diminished force. No, he seeks . . . I think he seeks the ones we have captured. But our glamour will blind his eyes. The moon wanes fast. Two more moonrises and then the old moon dies—and on that night they become ours forever. Listen—send out the word before dark comes. No one is to venture forth until that happens. No one is to leave the palace, not even to dance on the green, not even to hunt or to sing to the moon."

"I will send the bats forth at night to spy for us."

"Yes," she agreed. "Just until the change of the moon. Once that happens, then if the humans come near we may kill them all."

"I will tell the others," Feonor said. "Should I mention that we have felt a human presence?"

"No," Lennan said. "Eireachdail desires one of these girls, you say. He is rash and foolish—that is his human blood still singing faintly in his veins. If he knew someone sought her, he would surely contest ownership of her. It is well that he is just warned about the prohibition against leaving the palace."

"It shall be done, my lady," Feonor said, bowing.

"Go. I shall weave a curse to follow this foolish human. He will not wish to come to our lands again!"

As Feonor left her, Lennan bowed her head, smiling, and began to shape the cruel and complex words that would bring terror and pain beyond enduring to the interloper outside.

* * *

The sun stood at zenith—maybe past it—when Dipper's phone rang trilled. He stopped in his circling, grabbed the phone from his vest pocket, and nearly dropped it in his anxiety. "Yeah?"

"Dipper?"

"Grunkle Ford!" Dipper yelled. "Listen, Mabel's missing—"

" _Again!?_ "

"I know, right?" Dipper rubbed his eyes. "She had a couple of girls over for a sleepover—well, three girls, there's one I don't know well. Anyway, they got into the notes I was copying from your commentary on supernatural creatures—Grunkle Ford, I think Mabel conjured up some fairies!"

"Fairies? You mean the Fey?"

"Yeah. It looks like she copied out the incantation."

"That's bad. There haven't been any Fey abductions of humans in a hundred years or more. There was a kind of treaty—but the Fey don't keep records, so—anyway, where are you?"

Dipper gave him the GPS coordinates. Ford, one of the world's most unapologetic geeks, didn't seem to think that was the least bit odd. "Okay, let me see . . . getting out my tablet . . . firing it up . . . the dark of the moon is—Monday night! That doesn't leave us much time. Listen, Stanley and I are going to take the next flight out to any airport close enough to Gravity Falls so we can rent a car and, I hope, get there by nightfall. You stay safe! Are you in the Shack?"

"No, in the woods!"

For a moment Ford was silent. Then he asked, almost too casually, "Dipper, is there an unusual-looking mound or hill around? It probably would be covered in heavy vegetation. It wouldn't be very tall or very large on the outside, but if you look closely at it, you might notice something sort of artificial about it. Do you see anything like that?"

"I'm standing right beside a hill," Dipper said. "Now that you mention it, there are a whole lot of saplings growing up the sides of it. I mean, their trunks actually seem to have rooted into the hillside, and they kind of interweave—"

"Dipper, you have to get out of there! Listen carefully: Back away. Don't take your eyes off the hill. Go carefully so you don't stumble. Tell me when you start backing."

"Doing it now."

"Now stop. Bow toward the hill, but keep your head up and don't look away from it. Now repeat these words: _Fágaim tú i síocháin_ _."_

"Uh—say again?"

Ford patiently repeated the words, and Dipper pronounced them as well as he could.

"Good. Now seven more steps back and then stop."

"Six . . . seven. Okay."

"Now bow and repeat these words: _Ceadaigh dom dul i síocháin_."

Dipper began, but Ford stopped him and corrected his pronunciation. Then Ford said, "Okay, last time: back seven steps and stop. Ready? Now say this: _Ní fhéadfar aon fuil linne a doirte._ "

Dipper did his best, and Ford said, "That'll do. Now, Dipper, turn around and run!"

* * *

Inside the Fey palace, Lennan's eyes, green as any cat's, flew wide, and the words of hate and punishment died on her pointed tongue. "They know words of protection," she growled to herself. "My curse has been broken before finding its target! Now he will return, and men will come with—" her lips writhed, then formed the obscene word— " _iron._ Eireachdail caused this! He will be our offering to Hell this Beltane! Or—" her thin lips creased in a bloodless smile—"or this May Belle he fancies shall be. Either way, he will suffer. Oh, yes, he will suffer!"


	7. Chapter 7

**Spelling Error**

 **Chapter 7: "Up the airy mountain, / Down the rushy glen, / We daren't go a-hunting / For fear of little men" –From "The Fairies," by William Allingham**

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:**

 _Sunday morning, July 7: Grunkle Ford won't let me DO anything! I'm worried sick. Why does Mabel run off and do stupid things? I'm so mad at her that if she walked in the door right this second—_

 _Who am I kidding? If she did, I'd give her a sincere sibling hug and not ever want to let her go again._

 _News, I need to record what little news there is. I have to concentrate. Real scattered. I didn't sleep much at all last night. I read in the Journals, paced, fidgeted, and kept looking outside. Then, after midnight, my two grand-uncles showed up with a million questions. They'd cut their trip short and caught the first plane back to Oregon they could. So anyway I sat in the parlor and answered them as best I could, took over an hour. Wendy had stayed over and sat there listening, too. She won't say it, but I think she's just as afraid as I am._

 _They took their overnight cases—the ones they'd had on their plane as carry-on—and went up to the attic to spend the night, my Grunkles I mean, sometime around two. I sat on the sofa next to Wendy and worried out loud about all the time we were losing. She listened, nodded, and put her arm around my shoulder and kept trying to cheer me up. "We'll get through this, Dipper. Mabel can take care of herself." But like I wrote, I can tell Wendy is really scared, too._

 _I slipped off into slurred speech, just muttering and mumbling, and I don't know when I fell asleep, but it was around three. I know that at four I woke up, and I was lying on the sofa, my head resting on Wendy's knee. She'd thrown a blanket over me, and she was sprawled back with her mouth open, sound asleep and snoring a little. Her right arm lay over my chest. I reached and softly took her hand and just held it and lay there awake in the dark, waiting for the sun._

 _Stanley and Stanford came down again at daylight, grabbed some coffee and toast, and said they were ready to go hunting._

 _They refused to let me go with them!_

 _I was so mad—I told them, "You can leave me behind, but I'll follow you. You're not gonna ditch me!"_

 _Wendy tried to talk sense into me. Then Stan and Ford promised that if they didn't bring Mabel and her friends back, they'd take me with them next time, if I got some rest first. "Me, too," Wendy insisted. I still wanted to go—but I was so exhausted that when I stood up my head spun and I couldn't even walk straight. I think that's the tiredest I've been since I reclaimed my body from Bill that time._

 _Wendy said, "Come on and rest, dude. You need it. Rest for Mabel's sake."_

 _She patted my back. I guess I was crying, but I couldn't help it. Why'd I have to do that in front of Wendy? She already thinks I'm too young for her, and there I was crying like a baby. I hate my life sometimes._

 _Anyway, finally I gave Ford the coordinates, and he and Stan set off to explore. Wendy and Melody got me into the guest room, and I did fall asleep—fell unconscious, really—right after they left, but then after what felt like just a couple of minutes, I heard my Grunkles coming in again and woke up._

 _When they stomped through the door, looking grim, I found out that I had slept for a little over three and a half hours. I was firing questions at them, and impatiently, Ford cut them short and told me the story. They'd found the stand of ferns, all right, a big irregular circle of them—but no mound inside the circle. Just a weedy clearing._

 _I said desperately, "But I know the coordinates were right!"_

" _Dipper, I'm sure they are. It's glamour," Ford said, putting his big hand on my shoulder. "By glamour I mean illusion. Fairy magic. They can baffle our eyes and other senses so we can't see their true nature, or any of their works. However, I know some possible ways around that. When we return to the forest, we'll be ready."_

 _Grunkle Stan was carrying a bundle of some kind. He looked mad, and he didn't say a word, just stomped through the house and came back without the bundle and then slumped in his old chair, staring out into space, his arms hanging down, his wrists resting on his thighs, hands dangling. "What did you bring in?" I asked him._

 _In a rough, angry voice, he said, "Their clothes!"_

 _Wendy gasped. "Oh, God, no!"_

" _Easy," Ford said. "It's not what you think. The way we found the clothing, spread out over twenty yards or so, tells the story. The garments weren't torn off or taken off deliberately. They just fell off as the girls walked along, circling the clearing at a little distance in the woods."_

" _How could they fall off?" I asked._

" _Because the girls were physically shrinking as they traveled," Ford said. "The Fey have them and want them as changelings. The Fey reproduce so rarely that sometimes they'll abduct humans and enchant them to become Fey._

" _They're turning Mabel into a fairy?" I asked._

" _Yes, they're physically transforming the girls into their own kind. Now, changelings aren't a hundred per cent Fey, mind—they can't use Fey magic, for instance. But never mind that. The process of transformation can't be completed until the turning of the moon—that's tomorrow night at midnight, the dark of the moon before it begins to wax again as a crescent. A symbolic death of the old form and rebirth in the new—" he broke off, shaking his head impatiently. "Don't let me slip into lecture mode."_

" _How do we attack them?" I asked._

 _Ford said, "The Fey are strongest between sundown and sunup, but during the daylight hours their abilities grow weak. We have all the hours of sunlight between now and tomorrow evening to rescue the girls. The Fey stronghold is really not very far away—a fifteen-minute walk through the woods, if you know the route. If the girls are not actually inside the fairy mound when the moon turns, they'll revert to their human forms."_

 _I asked, "Grunkle Stan, what did you do with the clothes?"_

" _I'm washin' 'em," he said without looking at me. "When we get the girls back, they'll need something to wear."_

 _When._

 _Not if._

 _I hope Grunkle Stan is right. Let it be "when!"_

Wendy said, "Dude, you had Mabel's nightshirt. I saw it. Look, let me go up to the attic and pick out some daytime clothes from the girls' bags, OK? I think they'd be better."

"Do that, Wendy," Ford said. "Thank you."

"Wendy?" Dipper asked. "Uh—do me a favor and find Mabel's shooting-star sweater, OK? It'll be folded in one of the two top bureau drawers."

"Sure thing, Dipper," she said.

She brought down underwear and one outfit for each of the girls. Then Ford said, "I've got an errand for you two, if you can do it quickly."

He told them about the unlikely thing he wanted, and Wendy and Dipper immediately agreed to go get it.

But, as Wendy pulled the old Dodge Dart out of the Mystery Shack parking lot with a spray of gravel and dust, Dipper fastened his seat belt beside her and grumbled, "I hope this isn't just to get rid of us."

"Chill, dude," Wendy said. "Even I've heard about this weakness of fairies. It's in a bunch of old tales. We need weapons, and this is a good shot."

They blasted through town, past churches where worshipers were beginning to gather for eleven o'clock services, and up the hill. McGucket and his wife were not at home—their outing with their son Tate was that day, Dipper realized. But he knew where the thing that Ford had asked for was kept.

When it had been the Northwest Mansion, the McGucket house was surrounded by walls and protected by gates. The massive front gates were still there—although never closed these days. Out back a wrought-iron fence six feet tall had surrounded the park, a one-acre grassy spot with putting greens and a badminton court. McGucket had taken these out in favor of a helicopter landing pad (he had official visitors from the Defense Department pretty often), and the wrought-iron fence and gate had been dismantled but not yet removed.

"Here we go," Wendy said, grabbing a four-foot wide, five-foot tall gate that lay near the piled sections of fence. "Perfect. Ugh! It's heavy, man!"

The frame of the gate was a rectangle with an arched top over the topmost horizontal bar. However, the vertical bars, which had been welded to the frame, were five-foot tall wrought-iron spears. Their tips were sharp enough to discourage climbers. Dipper took one side, Wendy the other, and they lugged it across the lawn and out to the car. It was too big to fit inside, but Wendy lashed it to the roof.

Then, because the ropes had gone through the open windows and held the car doors shut, she and Dipper had to worm in through the windows. Wendy Went in gracefully, feet first, as if she'd practiced it a million times. Dipper crawled through the passenger window, fell to the floor, and had to squirm up to sit in the passenger seat. "Buckle up, man," Wendy said. "We're losin' time."

By then it was getting close to noon. Though the days were getting shorter, they still had time—the sun wouldn't set until about nine PM, though Gravity Falls Valley would lose the sunlight earlier and lie in dusk by that time. When they arrived at the Shack, Soos met them and helped take the gate off the car. "I know what to do, dudes," he said, firing up his acetylene cutting torch. "You guys go get ready."

They found Grunkle Stan stuffing the girls' clothes in a backpack. Wendy shook her head and took over, folding them neatly and packing them away. Ford was down in his workshop—he still kept keys to the Shack and had free access to his old underground haunts, the lab and the workshop—and when he came up, he carried one of those conical glass Erlenmeyer flasks full of a rosy-pink liquid. "Did you find it?" he asked Wendy.

"No sweat, Ford," Wendy said. "Soos is cuttin' it up for us out in the yard."

"Then let's go," rumbled Stan.

"First we have to prepare." Ford reached in his jacket pocket and produced a box of cotton balls. "Stanley, you first. Sit in the chair. Close your eyes. This will feel a little warm because I just brewed it."

He soaked a cotton ball with the pink solution and sponged it onto Stan's eyes. His twin grimaced. "Ow, it's hot! Hey, what is this stuff? It makes my eyelids tingle like bees are havin' a square dance on them!"

"It's a potion that will give us second sight for the next twelve hours. Wendy, you next."

Stan asked, "Can I open my eyes?"

"Go ahead."

Wendy sat in a chair and Stan applied the mixture to her eyelids as Stan blinked and looked around. "Holy cow!" he said. "This stuff works! Ford—I never realized how ugly you were!"

"I'll resent that after all this is over. Dipper."

Dipper stood while Stan pressed another soaked cotton ball against his eye sockets. The solution was cool by then, but Stan was right—it gave him the oddest tingling in his eyelids. Some of it trickled into his eyes, too, stinging a little. "You can look now," Ford told him.

When Dipper opened his eyes, he said, "Nothing looks different."

"It won't," Ford told him. "Not until we see a fairy, or something fairies have made. You'll tell right away—there'll be an aura, a colorful glow, around such things."

"But Stan said—"

"I was jokin', kid," Stan told him. But he didn't smile.

Wendy said, "Hey, Dip, do I look the same?"

"Still beautiful," Dipper said, and blushed when both Stan and Ford chuckled.

"Hey, you guys, lay off him," Wendy scolded. "He's sweet!"

In the yard they found that Soos had liberated four of the spears from the gate frame. "Used a grinder to sharpen 'em up a little, too," he told them. "Look, I'll go with you if you want."

"Thanks, Soos," Ford told him, "but this isn't a fight you can help with. You take care of Melody and the Shack and be ready for us to return. If we can rescue the girls, they may have after-effects that we'll have to treat."

"Not if," Dipper said defiantly, picking up one of the heavy, unwieldy iron spears. "When."

Ford smiled at him. "When it is. Let's go!"


	8. Chapter 8

**Spelling Error**

 **Chapter 8: "The Sonne, yt lour'd as red as bluid, / The Knycht yn armour was arrai'd; / The Fey Lord square be-for hym stood, / And Deth was in his blayde." – "Ballad of the Knight and the Elf-Prince," anonymous**

"Dawgs! Wait up!" They had not yet reached the woods. Huffing from the effort, Soos came running and jingling toward them. "Whoo! Glad I caught you. This is like iron, right? I mean, it's steel, but it's iron enough to rust. Think this will help?"

Ford took the coil of jangling chain from Soos. "It just might."

"Yeah, it's been hangin' in the junk room forever. Good luck, guys."

Stan reached for the chain. Ford said, "I'll carry it."

"Ya nuts? Look, this is an old shirt. I don't care if it gets rusty. You wore a good jacket." Stan pulled the coiled chain over his left arm and head and let it hang over his chest like a bandolier. "This is heavy! Light chain, but there must be a hundred feet of it. Think it'll be of any use?"

"Maybe. I'm thinking we might lay it out to surround the mound. Iron has the property of weakening fairy glamour. I don't know about steel. They say cold iron is best—iron that's been shaped and pounded on an anvil. Maybe it's because it's more magnetic, I don't know."

Dipper impatiently took the lead—until Stan called him back. "Ease up, kid. We'll get there."

Wendy, her axe in her hands, murmured, "It's like weirdly quiet."

They paused. She was right: no sound disturbed the silence. "Something's building up," Ford said. "Let's move out."

"It's getting' foggy," Wendy said after a few more steps.

"A conjured fog," Ford said. "It's okay. We marked the path.

Dipper saw him constantly glancing at the ground, but it took him a few minutes to spot what Ford was looking for. "Steel bearings?" he asked.

"Yeah," Stan said. "My idea. I suggested blazin' a trail when we were talkin' it over last night, but Braniac here said that'd do no good."

"Because the Fey would only strike an identical blaze on every tree," Ford explained. "Old trick of theirs."

"But when he said they couldn't stand iron, I grabbed a bag of these things from Fiddleford's workshop store room. When your hobby's buildin' cockamamie giant robots, you use a lot of bearings."

The steel spheres had not been moved or disturbed—and to Dipper's eyes, the fog was lighter in the space around each one. Before a quarter of an hour had passed, they reached the stand of ferns. "This is it," he said.

"Let me take a quick look." Ford parted the fronds—they grew higher than his head—and grunted. "The St. John's wort, rose, and clover potion works. I can see the mound now. It's quiet—nothing coming in or going out."

Something whizzed, and Wendy yelled, "Look out!" She thrust her axe right in front of Ford's face as he jerked his head back—and something clinked off the steel axe head. Dipper saw it spin up and over, and then it fell to earth—a tiny arrow, only two inches long.

"Don't touch it!" Ford warned, ducking down. "That's an elf-bolt. It would paralyze you—or worse. Thank you, Wendy."

"'S OK, Dr. Pines. Just be careful, okay?"

"That goes for all of us."

"Okay," Stan said, "so those little jerks are gonna play rough if we try to approach the mound, are they? I say let's start a fire and smoke 'em out!"

"No," Dipper said. "Mabel's in there!"

"Yeah, yeah, I was just lettin' off steam," Stan growled. "Any ideas, Ford?"

"According to legend, the Fey have to accept a challenge to battle. I'll issue one—I'll meet their champion head to head, and we'll fight it out. If I win, they have to grant our demand."

"Yeah, an' what if you lose?"

"We'll worry about that when it happens," Ford said.

"Nuts. I'll issue the challenge. You're a thinker, not a fighter."

"Stanley, it isn't a question of muscular strength. You have to know how these things think, how to take advantage of their weaknesses. I'm the logical one."

"Let's talk this out." Stan looked down for a second, then made a plunge for the fern barrier.

But Ford grabbed his arm and held him back. "Don't be an idiot! Not now! They'd shoot you down before you could say a word. We have to wait until sundown—that and sunrise are the only two neutral times!"

"But we're gonna lose Mabel!"

"Tomorrow night, Stan! Tomorrow night at midnight. So at sunset today I'll issue the challenge, and if I can, I'll set the time for the duel during the hours of daylight, when we'll have an advantage."

The two of them argued. Wendy kept watch, staring at the stand of ferns. The fog swirled and eddied.

Dipper moved away from them. He took from his backpack the enlarging and shrinking flashlight. He found the broken-off stump of a fallen tree—a pine, fittingly enough—that he thought he could locate again, wedged the light into a crevice of the stump, and switched on the shrinking ray. He stepped into it.

How big were fairies? About six inches, he thought, remembering the one that Soos had once mistakenly swatted. When he was that height, he jumped out of the beam. Then, with some difficulty, he stood on tip-toe and switched the light off. It would stay there until he got back.

Now that he was small, he slipped into the towering jungle of ferns. He had to fight his way through, but when he emerged inside the barrier, he could see the fairy mound clearly—not just an unsightly heap of rubbish and roots, but a strangely structured thing, the tree roots forming regular arches. He even glimpsed fairy faces staring out from them, keeping watch—but for human-sized enemies, not for anyone no bigger than they were.

 _I won't try to get in. I'll just see if I can locate an entrance. That might give us an edge later. Fifteen minutes, max. I'll scope it out and then return._

He plucked fern fronds, weaved them together into a kind of poncho, and pulled that over his head. He took off his cap and stuck it through his belt. _Okay, I'm a fairy. Or a sprite or something. One of their own kind, anyway. If they see me, I'll bow and smile._

No one seemed to notice him, though. Now that he was small, the fog became more of a dismal drizzle, the droplets of water seeming much larger. He moved around the base of the fern barrier, sometimes scrambling over roots. Once he heard a strange buzzing and crouched down, staring upward—two fairies, whether male or female he could not tell, flitted overhead, their wings droning like bees' wings, and they zipped inside the mound through an arched opening high up.

Halfway around, and then Dipper saw what he was looking for: another arch, but this one a tall and narrow one that started at ground level and reached to a point halfway up the mound. _That's it. That's the entrance._

How to mark it, though? He fought his way back to the far side of the ferns. There he regretted being only six inches tall—it made for hard work. But he tore more fronds loose, arranging them on the ground to make a roughly-shaped arrow pointing inward. If they could find this, they'd have an idea where the opposing forces would appear.

Back through for a last look around. The mound was quiet—he couldn't even spot the faces of guards now. Dipper retraced his steps. He was almost back to the point where he'd first come through when a laugh froze him in his tracks. A very familiar laugh.

He spun and yelled, "Mabel!"

And for an instant—just one instant—he saw her face looking out from one of the openings. She gave him one shocked, frightened glance and then vanished inside.

Clenching his teeth, knowing that on his own he could do nothing, Dipper stripped off his fern-frond disguise, slipped through the ferns, and found the place where he'd left the flashlight. All he could do was report what he had seen.

* * *

"That boy looked familiar," Gohalainn said, turning from the window. "I think I know him from somewhere."

Sruthan, frowning, was trying to fly. Her small wings buzzed but were too weak to lift her off. "Was he cute?" she asked.

"I don't know," Gohalainn murmured. "He looked strange. No wings."

"Was he a Gnome?" Milis asked. On one of the soft pallets on the floor Isbrea still slept—she had been the most resistant to their being confined in this room of the Palace, and perhaps the guards had cast a spell of some sort, because she had hardly been awake.

"Gnome? I—I think I married a Gnome once," Gohalainn said slowly.

Sruthan laughed and stopped leaping around. "'Alainn! Don't be cray-cray! We don't marry Gnomes!"

"There was something—the boy reminded me—I don't know," Gohalainn confessed. "But I'll marry Airy, won't I?"

"That is what he says," Milis agreed with a broad smile. "After your wings grow fully in."

"After the _FEASSSST!_ " Sruthan added. "I'm so _hungry!_ They haven't offered us anything since we got here!"

Gohalainn stared out the window, but the boy had vanished into the ferns. "Since we got here," she said. "Where did . . . we come from?"

"From out there," Milis said. "Everyone comes from out there."

"But why can't I remember?"

"You will make new memories, I think," Milis told her. "When you become Airy's mate."

"Wife," Gohalainn said absently, not looking around.

Sruthan said, "What's that?"

And Milis added, "We do not know that word."

Within Mabel Pines's diminished form, her heart misgave her.

* * *

The others hadn't even missed Dipper. Stan was on watch. Wendy sat at the base of a tree. Her iron spear lay beside her; across her knee she had her axe, and with a whetstone and oil she was carefully and expertly sharpening the blade. The cutting edge already gleamed like silver. Ford was pacing and muttering to himself.

Dipper tried twice and finally got his attention. "Yes, what is it?" he asked impatiently.

"I know where the main entrance to the mound is," Dipper said.

"What? How did you find out?"

"I—uh—peeked."

"What? Dipper, you didn't! You could put our whole effort at risk!"

"Grunkle Ford, yell at me later. Right now, let me show you where the big doorway into the mound is, okay?"

Ford pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes. "Okay. But I'm very disappointed in you."

"This way."

They walked about a quarter of the way around the fern barrier until they came to the improvised arrow. "Right here," Dipper said. "If you go straight through the ferns, you're standing opposite the doorway."

Cautiously, Ford parted the higher fronds just enough to peek through. "I see it," he said, retreating. "Good work. This will be where they mass. If it comes to a pitched battle, we stand a better chance here than letting them get out of the circle and attack us from all directions. Let's make a better marker, though." He took a jackknife from his pocket and carefully blazed a tree. Then from somewhere he produced a permanent marker and signed his name on the inner wood his cut had revealed.

"What's the point of that?" Dipper asked.

"Ah. The Fey are cunning. If they should happen to notice what I did, they could easily make similar cuts on all the trees around, so we'd never be able to find this one. However, they can't imitate a permanent marker, and I doubt they could convincingly imitate my signature. And now, just to make sure—yes, here we are." He pulled one of the steel bearings from his pocket, then used the tip of his knife blade to hollow out a small recess just below the blaze. He thumbed the bearing inside it, then tapped it with the heel of the knife haft. "There. The metal will keep the Fey from meddling with this sign. You go get the others and bring them here."

Grunkle Stan complained, of course, but Wendy came along readily. "You look kind of mad," Dipper told him.

"I am," she said. "I have about had it with magical creatures screwin' with my friends. Time comes, I'm gonna chop me some fairies."

Stan dumped the coiled chain and grumbled, "Looks just like the other spot to me."

They camped near the blaze on the tree. They made a sort of damp campfire that produced more smoke than heat. They waited until Ford's phone told him it was sundown. Then he stood, faced the Mound, invisible behind the shielding ferns, and bellowed, "Ruler of the Fey! Hear me! You have taken our kin and our friends! We reclaim them for humanity! If you will return them, we depart in peace and leave you to your own lives. If you refuse, I challenge the champion of your naming! We will fight to the death to reclaim our own!"

As soon as his voice stopped, a wind sprang up. The mists coiled away and vanished. Above the trees Dipper could glimpse the dusky sky, one faint star already showing. Something rose from behind the ferns, hovering in the air—

 _That's weird! She's as big as Ford, and she's dressed in fire! But—_

Dipper blinked. But she was also a reddish-pink thing only six inches tall, hanging in the air with jerky little hummingbird movements. This tiny creature lay somehow at the heart of the big one, which seemed almost transparent—

And the big one carried a blazing sword. She spoke with a furious voice that shook the air: "Mortals! Leave us! What we have, we own because they called us! You cannot retake what is no longer yours!"

"You stole them away and gave them no free choice," Ford yelled back. "I demand the right of single combat!"

"You have no power to demand that!"

"I say I do, and I conjure you to consent!"

She laughed, a cruel sound. "By what puny power do you think you conjure me, the Queen of the Fey?"

"By your true name!" Ford thundered. "I call you by your true name-Lennan Frenhines Mawr!"

The illusion of size collapsed, and the Fey, revealed in her true size and form, pulsed with fiery flashes of heat and light. She screeched, rose, and plunged back behind the ferns with a buzz of wings.

"Did—did it work?" Dipper asked, swallowing hard.

"We wait and see," Ford whispered. He held his iron spear before him. "Be ready for anything."

There came a fanfare of trumpets—seemingly far away, but really only small instruments just beyond the fern—and then another diminutive flying form appeared. "I accept the challenge," this creature said. It was a blue fairy, but as it lowered itself to the earth it grew into a tall man-shape, strangely thin and elongated, wearing scanty clothes—if they were clothes—of skins lashed together with thongs of leather. He looked like a strangely-shaped sharp-featured young man of thirty, fine-boned and grim of face. His bare feet, their toes unnaturally long, touched the ground and his wings folded. "I am Ereachdaill, and I name myself champion of the Lady Gohalainn. One of you is willing to fight me to the death to claim her and her servant girls from the Fey?"

"Yes," Ford said.

"You understand you must kill me to win them, and that if I defeat you, you die—you all die? The Fey will allow no human to escape from this place."

"We understand," Ford told him. "And if you die and the Fey don't return our friends, then they all perish."

"If you could only kill them," the Fey man said with a sneer.

"We have the means," Ford said, his voice so serious that his opponent actually took a hesitant step backward. "We understand the terms."

Ereachdaill took a deep breath. "Then prepare yourselves, humans." In his thin, long-fingered hand—he had not drawn it from a scabbard, but there it was—appeared a wickedly curved blade, sinuous like a snake and blazing with a cold blue flame.

Ford stepped forward, raising his spear, but Ereachdaill shook his head and gave him a shark-toothed grin. "You threw the challenge, but by our law I choose my opponent." His grin became fiercer and he pointed. "You. I fight you until one of us dies."

"No way!" Wendy said, raising her axe. "Dude, I'll fight you!"

"He's just a kid!" Stan roared.

"I'll do it," Dipper said. "I'll fight him."


	9. Chapter 9

**Spelling Error**

 **Chapter 9: "Young man, I think you're dyin'"—from "Barbara Allen," old Scots ballad**

Ford stepped between them, his spear raised across his chest. "No. I forbid this. I issued the challenge. You must face me."

Ereachdaill glared at him, his eyes blazing an unearthly blue. "The choice is made, the deed is done. Step aside, man, or forfeit the girls." He grinned. "Lennan the Queen means to send one of them to Hell next season. The Dark One demands a tithe of blood once every seven years, and the Queen pays with human blood! Now, which one shall it be, do you think? Stand there, and perhaps when the deed is done one of the Fey shall bring you the answer."

"I got this, Grunkle Ford," Dipper said. "Let him pass."

Reluctantly, Ford stepped aside. "Dipper! Get your guard up!"

The Fey grinned. "I am Ereachdaill the dreadful foe! I bring your death!"

"Yeah, well, I'm Dipper Pines. Bring it on!"

The Fey's glowing sword arced, a blue semicircle cut out of the twilight, not in attack but in intimidating display. Dipper whipped up his spear, and the next instant it clanged—

Against the one that Grunkle Stan had hurled at Ereachdaill, sending it spinning into the twilight. "Ya knucklehead!" Stan bellowed. "That coulda taken him out!"

"No help," Dipper said, stepping backward as Ereachdaill took slow steps toward him. "No cheating. Wendy, that goes for you, too."

The blazing blue sword arced, and dipper got the spear up just in time—but held it crossways between his hands and caught the Fey blade as it rang down. It struck with surprisingly little force, but the iron glowed a smoking red-hot, sent of sparks, and made an angry hiss. After a heartbeat, Ereachdaill jerked back as if he'd received an electrical shock.

"C'mon, Dipper!" Wendy yelled, "Stab him!"

Dipper had backed up beside an old-growth black oak, its trunk about five feet in diameter. As Ereachdaill drew back his sword, Dipper ducked behind the tree, there was a flash of light, and the Fey warrior swung, the sword hissing right where Dipper's throat had been a moment before—

But the blade bit hard into the wood. "Where are you!" Ereachdaill bellowed in fury. "You cannot hide from me! That will forfeit the fight!"

"But I'm right here!" Another flash, and Dipper grew from only inches tall to his full size. The size-changing flashlight hung from his neck on a thong, and before Ereachdaill could wrest his sword from the oak, Dipper thrust his spear between the Fey's legs and tripped him up.

Ereachdaill fell backwards, spreading his wings, and lifted into the air—but now at six inches tall.

"No flying!" Dipper taunted.

The Fey settled to earth and grew back to human size as he did so. He stood unarmed, the Fey sword still vibrating, its blade caught in the tree. "Then kill me," he said. He touched his heart. "Strike here, and strike true."

But Dipper raised the spear and held its point a few inches from the Fey's throat. "But you're not down there," he said. "I can see you. Your human body is a trick, a glamour. You're fluttering right here."

"Kill him!" Stan yelled.

"None would blame me if I did," Dipper said softly. "Let them go. Let them go and you live."

"You don't understand!" Ereachdaill said fiercely. "Strike!"

"No. Bring back my sister and her friends."

"But I can't do that! The Queen—"

"The Queen," came an icy voice, "is here—traitor!"

Ford called out, "You named him your champion! You can't go back on your word!"

"Kill them," the Queen said carelessly.

Dipper heard the whirr of wings then, hundreds of them, and from the space above the trees Fey warriors dropped down, arrows nocked in their bows, drawing aim on the humans.

He dropped his spear and reached into his vest.

"And Ereachdaill, too!" the Queen screamed. Then she noticed Dipper. "What are you doing—"

Dipper squeezed the trigger. The alien magnet gun, for once, pulsed and registered a full charge—and then an expanding wave of magnetism burst from it, enveloping first Lennan, then the descending Fey army—

They tumbled from the sky, wings locked, unable to keep themselves aloft. Dipper pushed past Ereachdaill, who had turned to retrieve his sword from the oak. It was getting quite dark now, but he stumbled over what he needed, grabbed it up, and turned again.

Lennan was standing and trying to grow. Her body, its magic disrupted by the magnetism, would not fully obey her—now she was a tiny torso and chest on legs nearly adult size, now she was doll-sized but weighed down by one huge arm, now she was in between—

Dipper threw a loop around her and caught her by the waist. She screamed, a high, inhuman sound, and thrashed like a shark caught on hook and line too small for it. Suddenly her body was a mass of hot flame.

But to Dipper it felt only warm. He squinted his eyes. The desperate Fey Queen was strong—she jerked him off his feet, then swung him around, as she transformed into something hideously like a rabid wolf. Dipper threw another loop of chain over her head and tightened it.

Wendy was at his side now, her axe raised.

"No, grab the chain!" Dipper yelled. "Wrap her in it!"

Her hands helped. Loop after loop, and the fluid shape they contained was no longer even vaguely human, nor was it Fey, but something straight out of a bad dream, a shape that perhaps Bill Cipher woke up shrieking about after jerking out of one of his worst nightmares. Sounds poured from the writhing thing, but in no language.

Ford said over the din "Ereachdaill! We have your Queen hostage! A life for lives—return your captives, and we will free her!"

Ereachdaill now held his sword, freed from the oak at last. He walked to them and stared at the heaving, shifting _thing_ wrapped in yards of chain. "That is not my decision to make," he said.

A new voice, a younger one, rang out: "No. It is mine!"

They stood back. From the dark sky a winged form, shining and silvery, floated down. "Fey Host, hear me!" she called—for it was a female, beautiful in the inhuman way of the Fey. "Behold, I claim the rule of Lennan's realm! I am Isbrea, banished to the human realm, now returned to reclaim what is mine!"

Throughout the woods, the tumbled and scattered forms of the fallen fairies now rose, flying unsteadily, not glowing brightly as she did, but flickering a dark orange as they traced jerky courses in the night. They did not attack, but hung all around, a hovering cloud of fiery sparks.

Wendy said, "Dudes, I know that voice. That's Mabel's new friend from town—Amy!"

"I never was Amy," the fairy said. "I hid with the family while Lennan searched for me—she wished to kill me, for she knew well that I was to become Queen after her. If she could have taken me in my right form, she would have killed me, for I was to be the tithe to Hell this year."

"Wait, what?" Dipper asked. "Where's Mabel?"

"My servants are bringing her and her two friends from our mound. In the morning, mortals will have lost all memory of the girl they called Amy, and your sister and the two others will recall this night only as a dream. When Amy's human parents return, there will be no sign that such a girl ever lived—because she didn't. I assumed this disguise only last year, and created a glamour in the minds of all who knew the Lowrances that they really had a daughter. But come the morning, there will be no memento of her on Earth—for all their memories of her are false, and they shall be cleared away."

Five brighter shapes came flying over the ferns. Dipper recognized one right away. "Mabel!"

That fairy, her colors pink and orange, dipped, flying unsteadily on wings not fully formed. "Boy? I—I know you."

"Give 'em back their right shapes!" Stan said.

"Then unwrap the former Queen," Isbrea said. "The girls will be restored after what must be done has been done."

"Are you going to kill her?" Dipper asked.

"Let her face the old Queen," Ereachdaill said softly. "That's how it must be."

"Else your sister will never return," Isbrea said. "Tomorrow's moon will seal her fate."

"Do it, Dipper," Ford said.

The seething mass of alien flesh within the circles of chain tried to bite him, but he found the creature weighed very little. He pulled coil after coil of chain off it, and at last it lay and heaved on the ground, still trying to regain its form, but managing only a horrible, creeping, lurching imitation of it.

"Lennan!" Isbrea shouted—when had she become human-sized—"you have lost your claim to your throne and your life. I overturn your rule and all your spells are now broken!"

With a hiss, the misshapen form became a striking serpent, but as it leapt, Isbrea yelled, " _Leig e sin_!"

The snake, caught in mid-strike, vanished. An eruption of white light blinded Dipper. He fell back from an outrush of heat that felt as if it were raising blisters on his face. His ears rang as he got unsteadily to his hands and knees. A hand reached down and pulled him up by the arm.

"Thanks," Dipper gasped. He turned on his flashlight. "Who are you?"

The old man who had pulled him up was nearly a living skeleton—he resembled nothing as much as one of the zombies Dipper had conjured to impress two Federal agents, and rags of skin clothing clung to his body. "I was Ereachdaill," the figure croaked. "But before that I was Abraham Hales, a woodsman. Now I am human again, and my years fall on me."

Someone moaned. Ereachdaill took a step toward the sound—and his leg shattered into fragments and dust. He plunged toward the ground, dissolving, leaving only a pale cloud hanging in the air.

"Dipper?" the voice sounded frightened and lost.

"Mabel!" Dipper yelled. "Where are you!"

"Right here—Aagggh! Why am I naked in the woods?"

"Yell again, Mabes," Wendy called. "I'll bring some clothes for you!"

"Here's the backpack!" Grunkle Stan yelled.

Leave it to Ford to light a flashlight. But he shone it upwards, not directly on the girls. Still, in the dim back-glow Dipper glimpsed them, Mabel, Candy, and Grenda, sitting up in just enough fern cover to partly conceal them. Then Wendy cut off his view, lugging a backpack. "Okay, Mabes, here's your sweater, underthings, skirt—Stan, didn't you think to bring _shoes?_ Grenda, these must be yours—Turn your backs, guys! Give them a little privacy!"

In a few minutes they were as dressed as they were going to get. Dipper had pointed his own flashlight toward the ground. Where Ereachdaill had last stood there was a pile of dust and a few fragments of what could have been bone.

"Grunkle Ford," he called, "Could I borrow your knife, please?"

"What for?"

"You'll see."

On the trunk of the oak that had nipped Ereachdaill's sword, slowly and inexpertly Dipper carved the words "ABRAHAM HALES ?-July 7, 2013. RIP."

Grunkle Ford carried Candy, Stan carried Mabel, and Grenda said she preferred to walk barefoot because the briars felt good.

Back in the Shack the girls got cleaned up, had their scratches bandaged, and got fed—"They never gave us one bite to eat," complained Candy—and then went to bed, exhausted.

The others sat in the parlor and told Melody and Soos the whole story. "Man," Soos said, "I know these woods have got, like, bizarre stuff in them, but fairies? Though I did once kill a funny-lookin' bug."

"Are we safe from them now?" Melody asked.

"I think so," Ford told her. "The new Queen isn't vindictive. And they've given their tithe to the devil."

"What is that?" Stan asked.

Surprisingly, Soos's Abuelita spoke up: "The old people say the fairies began when some of the Angels of the Lord took no sides in the devil's rebellion. The bad angels, they revolted; the good angels, they stood by the side of the Lord and fought for him; but a third of the angels took no side, and in the end they were cast out of Heaven. They had no place. They could not return to Heaven. They could not live in the bad place with the devils. So the Diablo, he says he will not bother them if they stay on Earth, but once every seven years they must make a sacrifice to him."

"But—but Amy never really existed?" Dipper asked.

Melody looked blank. "Amy? Who's that?"

"Uh—Amy Lowrance? Her mom and dad own the pharmacy?"

Soos looked worried. "Dude, are you okay? The Lowrances don't have any children."

Dipper exchanged a look with Wendy, Ford, and Stan. It was clear they all remembered—but from what the girls had said on their way home, it was clear they did not.

The Stans and Wendy got ready to go, but for a moment they all stood in the parking lot. "Am I wrong?" Dipper asked. "Did we just get caught up in a political coup in Fairyland?"

"Something like that," Ford said. "My hunch is that Isbrea had to flee because Lennan's reign was getting shaky, and Lennan knew that Isbrea would be the next queen. I think Isbrea recruited Hales—or Ereachdaill, as the Fey knew him—to help her. In return she'd grant his wish."

"Which was what?" Stan asked.

"To die," Ford said. "Something inside him knew he was human—and yearned for his final fate, after all these long and empty years."

"So—they made me write the fairy-calling spell in my Journal?" Dipper asked. "They made Mabel and her friends take over the attic?"

"I don't think so," Ford told him. "They took advantage of what happened. Mabel told me a little of what went on. They didn't even perform the rite properly. It shouldn't have worked. But Isbrea had sensed that someone who knew fairy lore was in the Shack, so she mentally nudged Mabel and the others to stage the summoning. Isbrea herself probably mentally summoned Ereachdaill. That let her get back into the Fey palace without Lennan's realizing it. It's a good thing that the fairies didn't give the girls Fey food, by the way—that would have made it much harder for them to be returned to us."

"So were we supposed to, like, kill Ereachdaill?" Wendy asked.

"If we did, we would have won the contest, and Lennan would have to surrender the hostages—something she definitely would have refused to do, violating one of the most important laws of the Fey. I don't think Ereachdaill would have killed any of us," Ford said slowly. "I think the whole goal of this plot was to turn the Fey against Lennan when they realized she was breaking their traditions and rules. So the old Queen passed, and the new one will be crowned tomorrow night. The death of the old moon is the birth of the new, and life goes on."

"Yeah, but the little flyin' cockroaches still ought to be exterminated," Stan growled.

"No," Dipper disagreed. "No, they're really not our enemies. Not our friends, either. The scariest thing about them is that they just don't care about humans one way or the other. I'd rather they hated us than just have this . . . cold indifference, but they are what they are."

Wendy yawned. "Well, I gotta report for work tomorrow, so I'm gonna be on my way. Dipper, man, you did good. I'm proud of you."

"Thanks," Dipper said.

He stayed in the parking lot until Stan's car and Wendy's had rumbled down the gravel drive to the highway.

 _What do you know? She's proud of me! But I was so confused about everything. I didn't really know what I was doing._

Feeling a little like a fraud, he stood alone in the dark for a few moments listening to night sounds—crickets and cicadas, the nearly inaudible twitter of bats, the insistent "whooo" of an owl, and away off somewhere a coyote or wild dog forlornly howling.

He checked his phone: 11:55.

What was it that the Duke had said in the Shakespeare play his and Mabel's class had gone on a field trip to see? "The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve. 'Tis almost fairy time."

"Almost," he said, and shivered a little. Then he went inside to bed.

The End


End file.
